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By Root 1197 0

war fervor was undoubtedly personal: as a teenager, she had spent several years at a girls' school in Paris, gaining a lifelong love of all things French and a suspicion of Germany. But beyond any such feelings and the tribal allure of wartime patriotism lay another motive for her and Christabel's volte-face. To embrace the war wholeheartedly, and publicly place themselves at the service of the British government, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leave the political fringe where their unpopular campaign of rock throwing and arson had put them and step into an honored position at national center stage. In this grave crisis, they knew, the government would be delighted to have the country's most conspicuous dissidents rally round the flag. And, to give them their due as political crusaders, they surely also knew that doing this could bring them closer to their great goal of winning women the vote.

In late 1914 it was easy enough for a reasonable person to support a war against Germany, which seemed bent on dominating Europe. Stopping Germany might seem a moral imperative, albeit a tragic and regrettable one, given the inevitable bloodshed. Millions of quite un-militaristic people in Britain felt this way. But now that Emmeline and Christabel had decided to back their country's war effort, to do so with the slightest ambivalence or nuance was for them unimaginable. Theirs was a world of good and evil, with neither subtleties nor paradox, and they had only withering scorn for anyone who didn't agree with them. In the next four years they would take their full-throated vehemence to lengths that would startle even their allies.

When the family divided, no one suffered more than Sylvia, for whom her mother's new patriotic zeal seemed a betrayal of everything the Pankhursts had once believed in. To Emmeline, of course, what was deplorable was Sylvia's position—which she shared with her exiled sister Adela in Australia: "I am ashamed to know where you and Adela stand," Emmeline wrote to her daughter. They would seldom communicate again.

For weeks after the war began, the British public read few details about the actual fighting. Many people simply went about their business as if it were peacetime; Charlotte Despard, for example, noted in her diary having "tea and conversation" with Mr. and Mrs. Gandhi at a London hotel. The first real news came like lightning flashes in a darkened sky on August 30. In a special Sunday edition of the Times, its correspondent wrote of

a retreating and a broken army.... Our losses are very great. I have seen the broken bits of many regiments.... Some [divisions] have lost nearly all their officers.... The German commanders in the north advance their men as if they had an inexhaustible supply.... So great was their superiority in numbers that they could no more be stopped than the waves of the sea....

To sum up, the first great German effort has succeeded. We have to face the fact that the British Expeditionary Force, which bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement. The British Expeditionary Force has won indeed imperishable glory, but it needs men, men, and yet more men.

That final paragraph had actually been written by the nation's chief press censor, and it had just the effect he intended: over the next two days alone, recruiters swore in 30,000 new volunteers.

British soldiers, George Cecil among them, first came under heavy German fire at Mons on August 23. Faced with infantry attacks and a colossal rain of artillery shells, Sir John French ordered his troops to withdraw after a day in which the British suffered 1,600 dead and wounded. Many a single hour later in the war would claim far more casualties than that, but to the newly arrived army, the toll was unexpected and staggering. Since transport was mostly horse-drawn, the battle also left fields and roads strewn with panicked, wounded horses. For the next 13 days, the British did little but retreat through the scorching summer heat—a chaotic, precipitous